Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.

A DARKLY STYLIZED NOIR SNOW WHITE SET AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF DEPRESSION-ERA MANHATTAN

Snow White: A Graphic Novel
by Matt Phelan
Candlewick
2016, 216, 6.6 x 0.8 x 8.0 inches, Hardcover

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Snow White: A Graphic Novel reads like a silent movie. Matt Phelan’s cinematic re-telling of the classic fairy tale, film noir style, uses watercolor to soften the edges of the film genre’s brash tropes, and blur the lines between grit and glitz in Depression-era Manhattan.

I am easily overwhelmed by graphic novels and often feel as though I’ve been caught in a bombardment of text or images or both. Phelan employs text in much the same way he does color — sparsely, and to great effect — so that the movement of the story comes from the art.

Color is used like mood lighting. Though the images are reminiscent of the gray scale of black and white movies, the flashbacks to Snow’s childhood after her mother’s death (her father’s subsequent spellbound love affair with the evil Queen, and Snow’s banishment to boarding school) are fittingly sepia-toned.

A blue and white winter, perfect like Snow, shines out of the window at Macy’s. The stepmother’s scenes are often washed in greens and burgundies — the colors of witches and blood. And, though not a thatched cottage in the woods, the home of Snow’s seven street urchin devotees is warmed by an earthy brown glow.

These subtle washes are balanced with startling red stains—flushed cheeks, blood, the infamous apple, and a smudge of green blush that bluntly confirms the femme fatale’s wickedness, and more deeply, and later literally, draws connections between this classic fairy tale and another beloved, cinematically transformed story — The Wizard of Oz.

Film noir and fairy tales each offer their own unique escapes into worlds that dramatize our fears and fantasies. In Snow White: A Graphic Novel, Phelan draws from the best parts of each form to create both a hardcover hideout and an artful homage to be read and revisited panel by panel, frame by frame.

– Mk Smith Despres

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EARTH AND SPACE CLAWS AT THE IMAGINATION, YET REMAINS ELEGANTLY REAL

Earth and Space
by Nirmala Nataraj (author), NASA (photographer) and Bill Nye (preface)
Chronicle Books
2015, 176 pages, 9.5 x 11.5 x 1 inches (hardcover)

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Since Daguerre’s first images of the moon in 1839, we have sought to capture the essence of the heavens above us through photography. We built observatories equipped with bigger mirrors and better cameras in the hopes that we will be able to see farther and yet more clearly. When those proved to be insufficient, we detached our telescopes from their earthly housings and set them in orbit.

Of course, looking away, out there, was not enough. We needed to be able to look back at where we are, and from where we came. So we sent astronauts into orbit and probes to comets and rovers to distant planets. And we stared at the photographs we collected in the hopes that they could tell us something more, something else, that maybe they could unlock just one more little mysterious corner of the universe.

As Bill Nye says in his preface, “I hope you appreciate the inherent beauty of each image. But I further hope that each picture and caption whets your curiosity about the science behind the astronomical phenomena.”

He needn’t worry. This collection claws at the imagination, invoking visions of starships and space flight, of wormholes and black holes and tesseracts and timeslips, and yet remains elegantly, effortlessly real. These are composite images, true, compiled from raw data sent back by those telescopes and probes, but that does nothing to lessen their beauty.

A small bit of clear, easily understood text accompanies each image, explaining the context of what it is we are seeing, whether a nebula or our own sun. This combination of scientific explanation and artist’s eye makes for a book built for slow perusal, perhaps on a day when it is hard to see the horizon. Earth + Space is a reminder of where we have been and what we have seen, an exhortation to boldly go and to see more, to see better, to see further. – Joel Neff

02/11/25